MATHEUS ICHIMARU BEDENDO

Departing from the “republican revival”, this work aims to settle the basis for an investigation about
the “ideological drift” of republican thought in France since the Revolution, at the end of eighteenth-century,
up to the consolidation of the Third Republic, at the second half of nineteenth-century. Taking the notion of
progress as the guiding line of our investigation, we intend to show that Auguste Comte’s positivism –
philosophical bedrock of Third Republic – in developing his critique of the “unlimited perfectibility” notion –
inherited from Enlightenment and more specifically from Condorcet –, at the same time (i) put an end in a
quarrel that guided the philosophical debate concerning “the progress of human mind” since the end of
eighteenth-century; and (ii) gives nineteenth-century a new paradigm to think henceforth the “development of
humanity”.